Unit VI: Wood & Furniture

Wood is the workshop's oldest material, and this unit treats it with the respect its age has earned.

Everything built so far has been small, flat, or soft: paper, cloth, pigment, clay. Wood asks more of a maker. It has a grain that must be read before it is cut, tools that must be held correctly before they are trusted, and joints that must be laid out on paper and in pencil before a saw ever touches the stock. This unit teaches wood the way the castle itself was repaired: patiently, with found and honest materials, and always to a standard of built true. Along the way it builds the furniture the whole school stands on: counting boards for the Runes classroom, drying racks for the Greenhouse, bench furniture for the Potions Laboratory, and the shelves and boxes that keep every department's stores in order.

The unit begins with the wood ticket itself: grain, saws, rasps, planes, abrasives, and finishes, with joint layout carried from Lesson 4's fastening into full bench work. Then come the thinking tools, the counting board and tally stick, whose long history runs from a marble tablet on Salamis to the fire that burned down Parliament. The second half of the unit builds for the other classrooms: racks and screens that dry a harvest without molding it, a bench that holds work the Roman way, and storage built to outlast the scholar who made it.

Unit Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, scholars will be able to:

1. Read wood grain and predict how a board will cut, plane, and split before a tool touches it.
2. Saw to a marked line, plane a true shaving, and sand through a sequence of grits in order.
3. Lay out and cut a mortise and tenon, and mark out a dovetail, on practice stock.
4. Build a counting board to measure and work sums on it with pebbles.
5. Build a drying rack or screen with sound air flow, and fit a laboratory bench with a filtration stand and vessel tray.
6. Build a shelf or box that is square, fitted, and finished to last, and state the storage rule of cool, dry, and dark.

In This Unit

The Unit VI Quiz closes this unit. You will find it, with its download, at the end of Lesson 26: Shelves, Boxes & Storage That Lasts.

What Scholars Will Practice and Make

The bench drills of Lesson 23, done in scrap until the saw follows the line on its own: a true cut, a full shaving, a surface sanded through the grits, and one mortise and tenon laid out and fitted. A counting board, gridded to measure and drilled with pebbles until its lines are second nature. A practice tray corner, measured, joined, and squared before any rack stock is cut. And a practice box in scrap board, six measured pieces fitted and squared, as the rehearsal for every shelf and storage box that follows.

Every build in this unit is rehearsed in scrap first. Wood forgives a patient maker and charges a hasty one, so the drills come before the stock, every time.

Wood learned and furniture standing, Unit VII takes up the sharpest work in the course: carving, inscription, and simple metal, where the tools of this unit meet stone, runesticks, and wire.